Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Steno Arcade Demo Is Here!

Second: The demo is complete! We currently offer four Jonathan Coulton songs, with permission:

I'm Your Moon
Mandelbrot Set
That Spells DNA
I Feel Fantastic

In the full game we'll offer many more Creative Commons-licensed songs, as well as a song editor to allow you to make levels out of your own music library! We'll also make the graphics a little bit splashier (and screen reader accessible!), and of course, the more money we raise, the more games we're going to be able to develop. We're hoping to launch the campaign in early January, so stay tuned!

2 comments:

Taren
said...

Looks great! Apart from some gripes with the way the lyrics are displayed it seems to just work perfectly.

And even those aren't anything major. When I stroked the last word of a sequence it sometimes landed in the next one. Usually there is enough of a break between them to stop this from happening but it threw me of whenever it did happen, especially in faster bits where the last word has very little time before the next segment anyway. Maybe special case those situations to give slightly more leeway? It also isn't really clear when it is possible to start a sequence which lead to some trial and error in some cases for me.

Also, and this is seriously nitpicking, the change in lyrics speed seemed slightly abrupt. Smoothing this out a tad with (de)acceleration being smeared a tad out would make it look a lot nicer in my opinion.

Really looking forward to this now. I could see real potential with things like an interface to spotify or leader boards as well. These might be less realistic for the official release but thanks to being open source...

Yeah, I think we're gonna tweak lyrics display in the final version, focusing on making the inputted lyrics a bit more dramatic and interactive. I'm not sure if we'll necessarily do anything to stop lyrics getting thrown to the next block of words if they're actually written in that time block; you could argue that it's just a matter of the player being too slow. But I'll give it some thought!

And yes, I'd love to have a leaderboard, at the very least. Not sure how feasible head-to-head realtime play would be, but that would be amazing if we could swing it.